HotToastyRag Everyone's seen Hello Dolly, but how many of you have seen The Matchmaker? In my opinion, the story without the songs is much better.In The Matchmaker, an older, meddling widower specializes in matchmaking. While she sets her sights on the gruff Horace Vandergelder, she also helps a poor young couple find love. Shirley Booth is two tons of adorable, and her characterization of Dolly Levi is endearing rather than annoying. The young couple is played by Shirley MacLaine and a pre-Psycho Anthony Perkins. They're both adorable and perfect as the proverbial "romantic leads" in a theatrical (The Matchmaker was first produced on the stage, just like the musical).Yes, it doesn't have the dancing and splendor of a colorized film, but I like it much better than the musical. Try it see what you think!

krdement This is old-time movie-making at its finest, featuring an ensemble of well-known, well-loved actors. Filmed before either Shirley MacLaine or Anthony Perkins had become established, this film doesn't feature a really big star. The headliner, Shirley Booth, delivers a typically nuanced, poignant performance, but she is hardly a big star. This film is all about ensemble acting. The story, the sets and the actors are all wonderful. This is a far better adaptation of Thornton Wilder than Our Town.There is one element of the film that prevents my rating it higher than an 8. Although they are consistent with Wilder's play, the constant asides, directed to the audience, are a distraction. As I watched the story, I found their constant reminder that I was watching a play instead of a depiction of life a real intrusion. I kept wanting to watch the story unfold in an uninterrupted fashion, and I wondered how that might have altered my perception of the story and the characters. Perhaps the device of the stage manager, as employed in Our Town, would have been more suitable and less distracting here. Or perhaps just breaking the fourth wall at the beginning and end of the film would have been better - employing some other method of imparting to the audience the information delivered in the asides. I just wished that this film had not employed the device of having the characters, themselves, step outside the story, directly addressing the audience. This doesn't ruin the film, but I think I would have enjoyed it more if the characters had all remained within the framework of the story. Simply put, I would have been more involved with the character of Dolly (and the other characters) had she been presented as "real" and not just a character within a play.Nonetheless, this is a highly entertaining film, superior to the succeeding musical versions of the story, and a better adaptation of Thornton Wilder than Our Town. I recommend it highly.

Ed This has, through no fault of its own, become a bit of a curiosity. Long ago eclipsed by it's musical version "Hello, Dolly!", the film seems like an introduction to the songs (particularly in the earlier part) which never come. This is largely due to the fact that the musical picked up many of the song titles from lines in the play. ("Put On Your Sunday Clothes", "Ribbons Down My Back" etc.) There are many more differences from, at least, the film version of "Dolly". In the Harmonia Gardens scene, Dolly is hardly the celebrated personage of the musical but just another guest. As played by Shirley Booth, she is hardly the miscast young diva Barbra Streisand was.The character of Malachi Stack, perhaps a sort of cousin of Alfred P. Doolittle of Shaw's "Pygmalion" or the musical "My Fair Lady", played by Wallace Ford, doesn't exist in the musical. There is no one posing as Ernestina Simple here; she "Simply" doesn't show at the Harmonia Gardens! And Ambrose and Ermengarde are also nowhere to be found.The play by Thornton Wilder is itself based on his own "The Merchant of Yonkers" which itself was based on earlier (early to mid-19th century) plays by the Austrian Johann Nestroy and the, even earlier, British John Oxenford.The film, I think unwisely, has many of the characters directly addressing the audience and no doubt this worked better in the theater. And I think the story and settings cried out for color but, of course, Paramount was clearly too cheap.How would these stars have done in the musical? Perkins, here a considerable improvement over Michael Crawford as Cornelius, could have done the songs not much worse (He did sing on the Broadway stage in the short-running 1960 musical "Greenwillow", but none too well.). Robert Morse would have been more than passable as Barnaby (He sang in "How to Succeed" of course.) and Shirley MacLaine could obviously sing well enough but Miss Booth was not known as a vocalist, at least to my recollection. But Babs' acting ability at the time "Dolly" was made was pretty non-existent and she couldn't sing a single note without milking it for all it was worth. I think Marianne McAndrew and Danny Lockin were fine as Irene and Barnaby.I think this film, for all its problems, is a considerable improvement over that of "Hello, Dolly!" but it is hoped that a decent version of the musical becomes available in the not-too-distant future.

Greg Couture "Hello, Dolly!", that marvelously overblown, elephantine 1969 movie musical starring Barbra Streisand, can trace its cinematic origins to this charming film, which, in its stage incarnation, had enjoyed a successful Broadway run a few years before.Paramount wisely employed the inimitable Shirley Booth to head the cast and, perhaps since she was no guarantee of big box office, despite her Academy Award for "Come Back, Little Sheba" (1952), they filmed it in VistaVision but not Technicolor. Too bad, because it's nicely mounted, smartly directed and well cast, with Paul Ford deserving of particular praise. His wonderfully humorous Horace Vandergelder makes one wish he'd been allowed to play the role again opposite Streisand (though, to be sure, he would have appeared to be much too old for Barbra, who was only twenty-seven years old when Twentieth practically bankrupted itself filming that monumentally successful Broadway bonanza.)Anyway, this version is genuinely charming and always repays a re-viewing. Its equivalent from a major American motion picture production company is almost inconceivable today, what with audiences whose tastes have been so brutally coarsened. Thank goodness there's a video version to pop into the VCR for those of us who'd occasionally like to take a bit of a holiday from all the troubles that beset us now.